I've been burned multiple times by this; the worst was a pair of remote control off-road trucks for my sons' Christmas presents. They had hundreds of 5-star reviews and both units worked for maybe 5 minutes each. Within days of Christmas, the listing was flooded with 1-star reviews from other conned parents with very similar stories.<p>The number of products impacted <i>must</i> be far over the 1% claimed. There are whole categories that have been ruined by Fake China and kids' toys is probably the worst. Headphones, as mentioned by another commenter here, are another.<p>This problem is quickly destroying Amazon's credibility with a lot of customers. I went to a Best Buy for the first time in a decade to buy a pair of iPhone headphones, just so I'd be assured a genuine product. I now buy my kids' toys at Target, just so I can be assured that there's a reasonable chance that they aren't crap.
"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic"<p>Get the hell outta here. Look at literally any product and you'll see a plethora of obviously fake reviews. The worst I've noticed? Check out headphones. 500+ 5 star reviews for cheap Chinese products all over the place. In fact, anything that's around 500 5 star reviews is probably mostly fake reviews.
Anecdata, sample size 1.<p>I bought some toy for a toddler. Upon receiving it, I realized that the description was misleading; many of the "pieces" they had listed boldly were just cheap plastic pieces of crap that had no useful functionality.<p>So I returned it, and wrote a 1-star review.<p>A few weeks later, I got an email from them: they were offering $30 if I took down the review. I ignored the email.<p>Several weeks later, another email: this time offering $40.<p>And so on.<p>Their latest email is offering me $70 to take down the review. I still haven't.<p>I'd forward the email to Amazon if (a) I knew they'd do something, and, more importantly, (b) I knew WHERE to send it!<p>Basically, Amazon has no interest in making sure that the reviews are not being gamed. Since the email goes through Amazon servers, <i>they should be able to at least make an attempt at catching such people!</i>
It's common knowledge among most techies that the majority of Amazon reviews are fake and that counterfeit items are a big issue, but most of the general population is completely unaware. I was searching for an inexpensive pair of polarized sunglasses last week and the "Amazon Recommended" ones had an F on FakeSpot with 70%+ fake reviews.
There will always be a desire to pay for reviews, since 70%-80% of shoppers check reviews before buying[0][1] (and growing[2]).<p>Amazon could help fix this problem by creating "sponsored" reviews. This way a company can pay for reviews in a non-scummy way, a reviewer (and Amazon) gets paid, and a customer can tell whether the review was paid for or not.<p>Or just pass laws to regulate reviews.<p>0. <a href="http://www.peopleclaim.com/blog/index.php/the-review-of-ratings/" rel="nofollow">http://www.peopleclaim.com/blog/index.php/the-review-of-rati...</a><p>1. <a href="https://www.chainstoreage.com/news/study-81-research-online-making-big-purchases/" rel="nofollow">https://www.chainstoreage.com/news/study-81-research-online-...</a><p>2. <a href="https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/2016/11/01/media-device-habits-of-the-modern-consumer/" rel="nofollow">https://deloitte.wsj.com/cmo/2016/11/01/media-device-habits-...</a>
And I've had issues trying to leave less than perfect reviews - seems like only <i>after</i> I spend time typing up the review (and sometimes uploading photos) does Amazon come back and say, sorry can't publish this.<p>Seems like a dark pattern to encourage only positive reviews.<p><a href="http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/" rel="nofollow">http://www.netinstructions.com/amazon-dark-patterns/</a>
“Reviews”, in general, are absurdly misleading on any site; Amazon is just prominent.<p>I’ve given real reviews on Yelp of businesses that had real problems. These negative ratings were shuffled off into their special bucket of maybe-less-reliable reviews, well under pages of HIGHLY questionable 5-star reviews. I also have a friend with a business who was plainly told that he needs to pay to ensure good reviews. Yelp is a scam, and wins by being a virtual monopoly (as Amazon reviews do).<p>It is also <i>amazingly</i> hard to get reviews on the App Store from real users, for instance. I imagine you pretty much have to ask 60 friends to “help” you, or pay somebody, either of which creates a pool of fake reviews. It really changes your perspective on any other “ratings” you see.<p>In the end, I think society will learn that this is another example of buyer beware, and you get out of it what you put into it. Since looking over “reviews” for 30 seconds is low-effort, it is low-value. If you want <i>good</i> results, you need to spend a good amount of time and effort researching products.
This topic keeps coming up in the news, and I've altered my shopping habits because of it. The competition has gotten tougher with Google Express, Walmart delivery and pickup, Target pickup, etc. When I order from one of them or make a trip to the store, I can at least verify the item I'm purchasing is from the manufacturer.<p>When looking at the reviews on Amazon, countless times I've seen reviewers mention to not buy the item from a particular seller because it was not genuine or was defective. If I'm not sure about the brand, I'll search it to see if its legitimate and if there are reviews/complaints on other sites. I'll also use buying guides when determining what to buy instead of Amazon reviews.
I'm not really sure why there are any <i>real</i> reviews on sites like Amazon, Yelp etc. Why do people leave reviews; what's in it for them? Is it some strange form of altruism where they're helping their fellow anonymous shopper while also helping out one of the world's most successful megacorporations?<p>Writing this comment has made me re-think why I'm writing this comment.
I've been using <a href="https://www.fakespot.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.fakespot.com</a> to flag bullshit reviews for a few months now. After many happy purchases informed by its review analysis, I believe it works.
Hmm, I had (apparently wrongly) assumed this had become common knowledge.<p>Now I am beginning to wonder what percentage of people are aware of this issue.<p>On a different note, I saw elsewhere (Axiom perhaps? I cannot remember) that amazon claimed it was only roughly 1% of all reviews that were paid for. Which based on my past experience in E-Commerce, seems significantly lower than would be estimates.
Last night I finally abandoned a book that was absolute trash, but had 83% 5-star reviews on Amazon. Looking at the reviews now, I see that most of them are written by people who only write 5-star reviews (it has an F-rating on Fakespot). Feeling like kind of a dummy right now.
One of the many reasons I let my Amazon Prime subscription expire last month.<p>Amazon is selling convenience. But it's not convenient to:<p>1. Filter out products full of Vine program reviews, which I believe are completely skewed due to the reviewers receiving the products for free<p>2. Read between the lines to filter out paid/bias reviews that are NOT part of the Vine program<p>3. Research to ensure the product itself is not fake or counterfeit<p>Feel like I'm shopping at the shadiest flea market in town.
I usually just ignore 5-star and 1-star reviews. Many of five stars are either fake or people who just bought the product and are too excited to leave an unbiased review. Many of one stars are from people who are not satisfied with the purchase process (slow delivery / fake reviews / broken item), so they leave bad review that doesn't really reflect product quality itself.
<i>According to outside auditors like Fakespot and ReviewMeta, more than half the reviews for certain popular products are questionable. Amazon disputes those estimates.<p>"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity."</i><p>The disparity in what outside services observe and users experience vs. what Amazon claims, and the increasing press coverage and online discussion of the problem, will force Amazon to take increasingly drastic measures to crack down on bogus reviews.<p>There is also the issue of increasing levels of returns for 5-star crap. But, while Amazon can absorb the costs of returns, Bezos truly hates negative press, and the Amazon PR machine will go to great lengths to get high-profile news orgs repeating the official Amazon line.<p>If they can't tamp down negative coverage, the best hope for generating positive press is to announce action - a crackdown, lawsuits against fake reviewers, or other evidence that they are "doing something" about the issue. Unfortunately for Amazon, they've done this in the past (1, 2) and the problem appears to have gotten worse.<p>1. October 2015: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/amazon-sues-1000-fake-reviewers" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/18/amazon-su...</a><p>2. April 2016: <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-alleged-providers-of-fake-reviews/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-sues-all...</a>
My own anecdote hints that it's even worse than just fake reviews... I actually just wrote a detailed multi paragraph 1-star review of auto parts I received from Amazon, with several photos, too.<p>They, Amazon, would not post it because they claim it doesn't "adhere to the guidelines".<p>The review was exactly as follows:<p>These are "SURTRACK/TRAKMOTIVE" brand axles, part numbers BM-8040 and BM-8041. I only installed the left side but since it didn't fit properly on my 2006 BMW 530xi I'm returning them. The OE part number is: 31607570275 and MFG part number is: BM-8041.<p>The problem was that the inner boot fits improperly and deforms/creases from being stretched when installed (see images).<p>Looking at the product images for this product on Amazon, as well as elsewhere online, you can tell the boot is very different from the product I received.<p>/end<p>Can anyone find anything that goes against their review guidelines in above?
There was a great Planet Money podcast on the genesis of ReviewMeta which I've been using on Amazon reviews since. <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=623988370" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...</a>
Reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp are a monoculture: everyone sees the same set of reviews and the same ratings. This creates leverage that makes it worthwhile for shills to spend large amounts of effort "infecting" those sites with bad information, since once they find effective ways of doing so it affects everyone.<p>So the solution must be a review system that works like Twitter, where each user has a unique "view" composed of sources they've selected, directly or indirectly. This diversity would make infection much more difficult and less rewarding for shills and other attackers.<p>I'm still trying to figure out the best design for such a system. The requirements and usage patterns would be quite different from Twitter's, and I'm not aware of any existing attempts that I can learn from.
Star ratings in general are just poor. In a 1 to 5 star rating, 3 is average but most people would perceive 3 stars to be above average. People tend to leave reviews only when they are displeased with the product, really pleased with the product or get something in return for making the review, in this case free products.<p>I tend to just filter on reviews that are 2 or 3 stars and use those to work out the cons of the product. These reviews are the most likely to be honest and can often give you the information that other reviewers forget to mention. Unfortunately, 2 and 3 star reviews are the least likely to be posted so you can only find them on products that have been reviewed hundreds of times.
I'm glad the media seems to finally be paying attention to a problem most people know/have suspected for a long time, though I wonder if Amazon will ever be held accountable in the same way FB has with Cambridge Analytica...seems like it will take a major crisis (someone dying or getting seriously injured buying a fake product on Amazon) for something to actually happen.
The trick on Amazon is to read the two star reviews. The one star can be PEBKAC, competitor stuffing and a lot of nonsense. The real deal very often is in the two star reviews.
I've actually very interested in finding a solution to this problem as well. I think the issue is that regular users who are more likely to give honest reviews currently don't have an incentive to write one as there's nothing to gain, but potentially something to lose. If everyone is rewarded instead of just the ones who give positive reviews (i.e ones who receive free stuff, getting paid for etc,), then the ratio of fake/legit reviews might balance out. And we just need a better UI to show the most relevant + recent reviews for each star rating. For example, in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DNTWTKH#customerReviews" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DNTWTKH#customerReviews</a> someone mentioned "All the reviews are non verified!! 5 starts with 100+ reviews...... something is fishy!!". It also shows that 54 people found it helpful. So think that's a neat feature.<p>I think blockchain might be a good use case for this. Cencorship resistant, decentralized review, not controlled by a single company, and anyone can contribute, and see the reviews (i.e via browser extension). And everyone is rewarded by currency when they provide a review. Just not sure how to prevent spam, and deal with people gaming the system. Perhaps a staking system could be introduced wherein a user would lose their stake if the review proved to be inauthentic (proving it comes with its own problems). Anyway, these are just some of things I've been pondering about before.
I've found that it's more useful to sort by negative reviews. It's reasonable to assume that the product is what it appears to be at face value, but customers tend to speak up if they feel like they got cheated.<p>On the other hand, I believe I read that some fake reviews are actually negative, as a means to funnel users to competing products. So who knows?<p>Can't trust anything I read on the internet concerning a product or service.
I think this issue is most interesting to look at from the other side. Imagine your goal was to create fake reviews for a product you created. How difficult do you think it would be to achieve given you expect a substantial economic reward for success?<p>This is why I find it difficult to blame Amazon for things like this - though that is not to say they shouldn't try, but I don't think anybody is saying they're not. It's just that this is something you might call a game of cat and mouse, but I think it may be borderline impossible to detect fake reviews if done well. Imagine I somehow get 500 confederates from geographically diverse regions, and pay them each a substantial amount of money to purchase a product and give a positive review. How do you prove those reviews are fake?
I generally avoid looking at good reviews when shopping due to this. Instead I assume that whatever doohickey I want to buy works as advertised, and look for reasons not to buy. Bad reviews are much more helpful in this regard, as they pinpoint weaknesses or other issues.
Just bought a rotating bike wheel light from Amazon Marketplace. It's a novelty item that draws images as a bike wheel rotates using persistence of vision.<p>I don't think anyone has every heard of the "brand" but it was sent from "the UK" allegedly.<p>It came with a US plug (I'm in the UK) and software on an 80mm mini-cd. That software is riddled with malware. It also has one of those comedy auto-translated user manuals.<p>Some of these trade offs I can forgive for the price. I can't forgive the malware at any price.
This is why I am starting to do almost all of my shopping by googling "Wirecutter [product category]". Or CNET for electronics. Amazon's reviews have become so useless and corrupted that I question why anyone would even bother with a genuine review. Luckily, Wirecutter gives fantastic, detailed guidance in just about any category you can think of. I'm finding them so valuable that I believe this would be a great space for more sites to compete in.
ReviewMeta has a great Chrome plugin that shows the "real" score (after removing all even slightly suspicious reviews) right in the toolbar
<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-review-anal/fjifglfkcaipnmhngbigdebkoikioend?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reviewmetacom-revi...</a>
News from Australia today: Australia's largest apartment developer Meriton fined $3 million for misleading consumers on TripAdvisor by preventing guests Meriton suspected would give negative reviews from receiving TripAdvisor’s ‘Review Express’ prompt email.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649912</a>
On a positive note, Amazon has been wiping out thousands of reviews this month. Whether blatant manipulations or legitimate reviews, dozens of sellers have lost their reviews. Amazon has been cracking down hard this month, and erring on the better safe than sorry side as usual with their wide nets. The only problem is that Amazon can't keep up with China.
Jeez, I don't think it's possible for this writer (Ryan Kailath) to be any more milquetoast if he tried. Amazon's reviews are completely bullshit. I never buy <i>anything</i> from Amazon (or Yelp, or...) without running the product page through Fakespot.com to check for fake reviews.
I'm honestly starting to believe that the "wisdom of the crowds" that so many startups and businesses rely on to reach "internet scale", is exactly the wrong approach. Between recommendation algorithms that can be gamed, content that can be paid for, and social media sentiment that can prove to be entirely manufactured, we need to come up with a new paradigm for our products (where "our" is the tech industry at large).<p>The days of allowing what are essentially anonymous sources to dictate what we do, where we go, what we buy, and how we think are coming to an end.
I hate it too but rather than just complain is it a solvable problem?<p>Reply All had an resent episode about it<p><a href="https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player" rel="nofollow">https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player</a><p>first they had fake reviews. Amazobn required actual purchases so companies would pay people to purchase and return. you can't ban returns otherwise there would be no negative reviews.<p>how can this be solved? some kind of reputation system? how would you lose rep?<p>I love to hear your ideas?
How does one protect oneself from these? Are there secure / private browser extensions that might cross-reference those reviews to other sites? Is everything fake news now?
"We have built a lot of technology to assess whether or not we think a review is authentic”<p>Really now? Has amazon considered firing those teams? Because that tech is beyond broken.
I find that even books are plagued with this issue. Some obscure technical books selling for more than 80$ will come in a very poor quality print, like they had been printed from a scan. Clearly the book has ran out of original prints, and somewhere they print it cheaply just to make the sell.
Simple hack to this problem is forget about buying stuff online.. go to the store and get it right away.<p>The Internet can not believed for much and is easily manipulated for the better of those smart or immoral enough (however you view it) to use it to line their pockets.
What if you just removed the stars and only had text? Makes buying based on "reviews" harder...<p>Could also do something like upvotes but then that just ends up with the same problems as stars.
Always always always, read the negative reviews, NOT the positive reviews. If the worst you find is "shipped broken" or something, it's probably ok. If you're reading negative product reviews instead, stay away.
As a marketer I'm already familiar with fake/paid reviews. It's the way to manipulate and it will be used whenever there is an opportunity for that. On the other hand review.network works on solution for fake reviews
Similar discussion about the fake Amazon review economy a few months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022215" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022215</a>
I have found <a href="https://reviewmeta.com/" rel="nofollow">https://reviewmeta.com/</a> to be an interesting place to look at the reviews and get a bit more insight into them.
Fakespot.com is your friend. I'm fast finding their service indispensable. Also their iOS app is super convenient - you just share a link in the Amazon app with it, and you unmask all the fake reviews.
There was a great Reply All podcast on this topic. Between it and this NPR article, and recent personal experience, I'm seriously questioning whether I want to continue my Prime account.
Google SEO, Amazon Reviews, AppStore Reviews, Facebook News. Fakes are everywhere. Fake it till you make it [0]. If you really think about it, everything around us has a grain of fake. Ads, startup pitch desks, TV, people relationships, politics. Everything! I almost feel like we're fighting the wrong problem.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_it_till_you_make_it</a>
Why don't they make a review system where the products with fewest bad reviews gets rated the best.<p>If the reviews have to go through Amazon's system it should be hard enough to fake.
The "true" customers will make bad reviews if they didn't like the product.
The "fake" reviewer can't rate their own products to make them get a better review, an they have to buy the competitors product x times to give x bad reviews.
How are there not laws that enforce companies to verify there reviews. I understand it is a complex problem, but first it was our elections were manipulated via spam advertising and now, most of the products that we buy are going to be.